Mann Mortgage’s best practices for successful change management

0:03
Welcome to our open house. Instead of examining hardwood floors, closet space, and kitchen layouts, we're taking you on a tour of what's happening across today's mortgage industry. During each episode, we'll hear from industry leaders and subject matter experts to give us an inside look into a hot topic, cutting edge technology, or new trend that can help accelerate your digital journey. Thank you for joining us. Come on in.

0:26
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ice Mortgage Technology Open House Podcast. My name is Carol Crawford. I'm part of the product marketing team here at Ice Mortgage Technology and I'm super excited to be back live in person in Vegas with our clients here at Experience 22. And with us today is Colin Tordale, Director of IT with Man Mortgage. Thanks for having me here today. It's really good to be in person instead of the virtual meetings they they've served their purpose, but there's nothing like shaking hands and seeing spaces.

0:56
And getting into some warmer weather, I'm sure. Yes. Sunday when I left Montana, it was 7 degrees and just sitting outside a few minutes ago, I think I got a sunburn. Well, Colin, I'm curious as to how did you get into the industry. I did a few years in the Navy, moved back home to Montana about a week in a job search. And my mom is at aerobics class talking to her friend. Julie was her name. She was the vice president of Man Mortgage and run the operation center. Overheard my mom and said does he know anything about computers?

1:25
My mom was like, yes, so she gave her business card. I called, had an interview. By the time I got home, I had a job offer. That's amazing. And since then, I mean you're the company has seen exponential growth. I mean, Pandemic aside, I think you're up to what, 500 employees now and what, 50 plus branches about 45 locations in 15 states. Wow, that's amazing. So when you think about that, what are you guys doing to like just continue that growth well, the past couple years.

1:51
Nothing. We just had too many loans to deal with. We couldn't think about growth right Like everybody else, times have shifted. Mark is changing. So now we're really looking at growth again. So we're gonna grow organically internally. We have people helping recruit Los in the local markets and then we're gonna branch out to even other states that we're not in.

2:08
And start to see if we can get people to join, great. So when you talk about just teach the market in general, how have you been managing capacity, that's always a struggle when it's down, you don't want to have too much staff on hand. And then all of a sudden the big boom hits like it did. Now we're scrambling to get people and try to train them in the mix of all that. It's a never ending challenge on the crystal ball, if you will and what we need for capacity. So what we're doing here is we're trying to get automation in place so we can do more with the same staff we have.

2:35
And handle higher capacity. I mean when you think about just the pandemic and and you know what it's taught us, you know new Poly heard Joe Tyrell talk about it today. The the fact that technology is playing such a key role in all of this. Do you think that there's, you know, a limit to the technology from a consumer perspective? What's what are you seeing from a borrower the ability to adopt that technology? Is there that hunger there? I think they're more willing to adopt technology today. Everybody's got it a supercomputer in their pocket now so.

3:04
You have the borrowers like my parents who will not do anything electronically. They won't even fill out an online application. They want to do it in person. But there's a lot of people that adopt technology and just want to use it as much as possible. We we're doing hybrid E closes now. Borrowers are really loving that. So much easier instead of an hour long session at title, they're there for 15 minutes. I think it takes them longer to fill out the notary book than it does actually sign those wet sign doc. So when we talk about balance, you know, the different audiences, different technologies, how are you guys?

3:33
Managing to that, don't automate, just to automate, right. So we really take a step back and if we want to automate this, is it going to give us a benefit? What's it going to give to us as a company as our in with our culture, with our people. So we really have to take a holistic look at it. So keeping that personal touch with your clients, what other solutions are you using to kind of keep ahead of the curve and trying to be the disruptor instead of a disruptee?

3:57
In the market, we're using Velocified to people that abandon a loan app on consumer Connect and trying to get back in touch with them right away, have a drip campaign. We use Total Expert for our CRM drip campaigns there even we have a new product for a construction lending division that 12 months construction process is usually the dead zone of no one's communicating, right. So we've built out communication drips to go out there, reminders to an Ello to pick up the phone and talk to the bar or see how it's coming along to talk with the builder. See that's amazing. I mean your team obviously is embracing technology.

4:26
Technology, technology aside, there's also a lot of training and just how is that, how is that kind of played a role in the last, you know, three to five years. I mean you've been in the business, your man mortgage has been in the business since the 80s. So I mean they've seen huge transformation since that time when they open their doors. Curious as to how the employees are embracing change and there are some that do not embrace change and just want stick their heels in. I have the best process ever. It can't get any better than this and no.

4:54
And then we have people are like like when we adopted AIQ, we had one corporate processor didn't want anything to do with it and another one she's like Oh yeah, I see a lift already. I love this. I don't want to go back within a week. She came to that conclusion. So that was a wide variety. So you know rolling new things out, we have to take an account and who's testing and to make sure we bring somebody that doesn't like change along with it. If they can adopt it, they are more of a spokesperson toward it and then get the people that that heavy testers are the ones that adopt to it easy to get in.

5:23
Know how to use it. It sounds like a great team. I'm curious like do you have like an advocacy group internally that just reviews solutions before they come to the market? To your point earlier, do you have ongoing reflection of how things are working for refinement? We have a change management process and we meet once a week.

5:42
And talk about issues, anything people have brought up, anything that we need to tackle. If anybody saw a new solution out there, what we need to do and we also look at our help desk queue because people always come to us with solutions versus what's the real problem, let's dig into it or I need this. But is it that specific thing you need or let's solve for the real problem, That's great because we talked about you know purpose of change and the people that are using the product and the process that result in the change. And when you think about that, what is the we think that that would impact your attention and just.

6:13
Your your overall, you know, bottom line as well. I think so too. As we approach change, change is tough for a lot of people. I always tell them, you know change is the only constant out there, right? We're always changing. But to embrace change in the work day and it interrupts their workflow that they are accustomed to their everyday muscle memory. I just go click this, do this, do this every single time. Even to the point where we turned on E close, it moved the docs order button over one and put the E close button where the docs order button was. And some closures were just clicking the E close button on accident just because.

6:42
Because that's what they're used to doing, clicking that certain area. So it's always a challenge when we bring change in and on board with it, others are. But overall if we have the directors and managers of the departments embracing it and cheerleading it to their team, that really helps adopt and let them know it's we're moving forward with. It also helps leadership top down. You know if CEO, he's behind it, everybody knows, OK, this is what we were going to do. So they.

7:09
Resistant. Yeah. It's a family owned and operated organization, isn't it? If I remember correctly, like your tenure is like 20-4 years. Wow. So again, we talk about, you know, just client retention, employee retention, use of technology to enable that, as well as, you know, improving your bottom line. And we have systems in place where people can reach out with ideas.

7:32
And if we institute one of those ideas, they get a gift card somewhere that's amazing. Yeah. So we try to get people that are actually working every day in the system or doing whatever they're doing to think of innovation every day as well. So can you give me an example of something that's kind of come to fruition with that corporate processing team with a construction loans they work with Dallas. They wanted to know when that last draw was initiated so then they could start reaching out to the bar.

7:57
They're waiting for our construction team to manually e-mail them or call them or tell them something. But our construction teams entering stuff in the system, so one of the can't we just get an e-mail generated to us or a Teams message? So using APIs now we can actually do a Teams message directly to them like oh there, that's wonderful. Another just random use of technology to make things easier. You guys use so many different solutions from ICE.

8:23
You know, thinking about that, you know what, what kind of lift have you guys seen? Just have you, have you done any time studies as far as like where where are you guys? Like again, Pandemic aside, you can't, you can't really use that because you couldn't really measure it. But you know now that we're kind of getting into a normalized market, I mean are you have you like been able to kind of do any comparisons to what that lift might really look like?

8:50
We're that's what we're going to do. We've engaged ICE to, we're going to do a study and try to look at Roi's but can't look back the past two years. We have to go back to 2019 and just look at our lone life cycle and and see what that look like then compared to now. I think we'll be pleasantly surprised that we have picked up a lot of efficiencies we had to during the pandemic because of the crazy volumes everybody had and then we come out of it and everybody got slow and you know we didn't pick up any efficiencies but.

9:15
Surprising that we really did. How is the technology enabled that whole work from home in the mortgage space for manned mortgage? Just out of curiosity. We've had all our underwriters have always been remote workers. So we've had remote workers quite, quite a while, but not the capacity that we did. We had challenges. Warehouse banks only allow you to access through certain Ip's and so we, our funders are working from home because.

9:38
COVID went through the office space so everybody got sent home and that was a challenge. So now we're all setting up VPNs back in the office and challenges of their Internet speeds at their homes were less than desirable because we live in Montana and there's some people that live out rally and a crawling speed, so.

9:55
So many other challenges that were faced with cybersecurity stuff that we have to deal with. Yeah, now they're working from home. Now what are, what are the security measures there? Because we need to protect the borrower data. It was a whirlwind. So thinking about that as well, I mean, what's on the horizon for man mortgage? Are you guys gonna be offering any new products? Definitely offering products. We're gonna build out our construction portfolio bigger. What else? We just switched subservices. So here we're doing E clothes. By the end of the year, we're gonna have a full digital mortgage. We're rolling out all the analyzers with a IQ like you mentioned. We do a lot of.

10:25
ICE products we'd like 1 system to go to instead of logins for 15 different systems and hopefully everything interfaces works. If it's organic within the same system, keep them in one system it seems to go smoother. But outside of that we have so many other projects. We're working with the APIs and starting post teams messages when an app's triggered and putting it in their to do lists and outlook when their disclosures are due. So there is.

10:51
Really, no excuse that they missed it. What do you what is your perception as far as like the Partner Network here at ICE and how is that working for you? Partner Network is great. I love being here, seeing people in person, and I've seen lots of people. I've seen that experience before over the years. We've all exchanged cards, we e-mail back and forth, different ideas. So you're making the one connection that Joe asked us.

11:11
About I think I did like 5%, so instead of the one, but yeah, we we like doing that a lot. I'm meeting people that want to talk about our story with AIQ. So they've asked ICE has asked us to meet with those people. So we're doing that. Fantastic. Yeah, it's interesting today in the opening session watching Stephanie specifically call out the analyzers and the new post close analyzer that's going to be coming to market as well. So there's a lot of interesting things will be coming.

11:40
Hike for us as well. You guys have been, I mean I've again week three, I tried to do a little bit of digging. You guys have been a very loyal client. We like our partnership over the years. Joe is very personable of talked with him several times and it's a great company that we found fits our model. We're like a family company too we make and we feel at home here. So I just I really appreciate you coming in and having this conversation with us.

12:01
And I'm so happy to actually see a face without a mask and have a conversation. And for everybody that's tuning in today, feel free to learn more about man mortgage at man with two ends. mortgage.com. Yes, thank you very much. It's a pleasure.